we now are here at this fiscal slope as i like to call it, not cliff. >> laura: presumably, no matter what you say about what happened a year and a half ago, the president was part of that equation, right? he is the president of the united states. >> he is. but there are three branches of government. >> laura: accountability for that as well: that's for sure and the democrats didn't get around to actually passing a budget so we need to move on to that that guy, we are going to have the republicans have only so much leverage. in effect they don't have a lot of power here, do they? not really i think we learned that speaker boehner own party we can go back as you said to the debt ceiling debate. the only reason we have cliffs and crises because democrats, particularly in the senate have completely abandoned the legally mandated budgeting process. we have not had a budget in this country for three years. that's why we keep having all these high stakes crises where we are really worried about some deadline that's looming. if we just passed budgets the way we were supposed to and the way t